Friday, March 16. 2007

It's been a long time since I've done some proper web design, but now I'm working on a mysterious project (long story) that requires me to dive-in once again. Compared to many other people, my design skills are mere tinkering in comparison. At the very least, though, my tinkering isn't as bad as the average MySpace page which is more likely to lock up your computer (it is considered the worst website around by many sources).

Unfortunately life in web design land is still a world of pain and torture.

The last time I designed, or rather tinkered, I found myself frustrated and stuck with minimalist designs that were easy to maintain across different browsers without having to resort to hacks. Now, even with the venerable (or venereal) Internet Explorer 7, I realise nothing has changed for the most common browser. Yes, Microsoft, I'm saying Internet Explorer is still a major disappointment.

My frustration grew to such a level that in 2003 I even got so angry with the lack of standardisation with the favicon "standard" (ahem) that I took it upon myself to standardise a MIME type, image/vnd.microsoft.icon, for Microsoft's icon file format. Probably not the best choice of name, but based on my usual level of laziness I must have been really, really angry.

Alas, some things haven't changed: I still have to sit and tinker each page while loading it repeatedly in multiple browsers. None of my more HTML-enlightened friends have as-yet passed on their wisdom for any easier method for this process, so I'm welcome to suggestions. At the very least, I start in Firefox and move towards Internet Explorer, working from strict to loose.

Resisting greatly at first, I switched to Firefox a few years ago, and despite some minor glitches (most of which seem to appear under Windows), the product is fantastic and I would strongly recommend it to anyone, from profound web-tinkerer down to home user.

At the office, I've broken one of my cardinal rules and installed Firefox with the Google Toolbar, only because of a few useful things that fit into that part of my life. It contains an easier search bar, search highlighting (like with Google's own cached page view, only better), and a brilliant auto-fill function that helps fill in all the boring stuff I have to repeat all the time on our Intranet forms.

Being a programmer at heart I tend to be very lazy, and as a result I love the presentation-free strict XHTML concept using CSS to define how the site should look. Breaking a design into content and presentation components makes it so much easier to work with.

A long time ago, I stopped using tables for layout, and now I find it's actually easier to work with a pure CSS site. It's very flexible, there's less to handle, and it works in line with how I see the world: broken apart into logical components.

Unfortunately, lots of people I know will moan about how pure CSS is the worst way of designing websites, citing web-giants such as Google and Amazon as examples where tables and spacers are still supreme. They claim this is because CSS is weak, flawed, and horribly incompatible. This may be true to a certain extent, considering the gaps in CSS2 support to date (let alone CSS3), but I recommend looking at CSSplay or CSS Zen Garden, which highlights what can be done in modern browsers using the pure CSS model.

I find myself going back and forth doing XHTML/CSS for either myself or other people. I felt I would learn XHTML 1.0 because "I had to" but there are a few key things missing from the Strict DTD which cause many design problems, so I’m sticking with Transitional these days, along with what looks like many other people. It would be good to be able to do everything one would need to do using the Strict DTD.

I have to admit that there are parts of me stuck in the 1990’s. CSS is something that took me a long time to grasp and accept, and I am still comparitively very slow on the uptake – using tables etc, but old habits do die hard, and I’m sure after CSS3 matures and becomes standard, I’d have only just learnt CSS2 and I’ll have to reinvent the wheel all over.

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